


In your orbit//Binary Star

by kaberett



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-29
Updated: 2014-05-29
Packaged: 2018-01-26 23:29:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1706528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaberett/pseuds/kaberett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A binary star is a star system consisting of two stars orbiting around their common center of mass. </p><p>
  <i>Spoilers through the end of season 2.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	In your orbit//Binary Star

Joan goes to the funeral, and she weeps for the man who will be buried under a name that is not his own.

(Sherlock does not attend.)

She meets his ( _their_ ) father, for the first - and, she assumes, the last - time, and she is too numbed, too overwhelmed by all that has happened, to do more than murmur a greeting and condolences for the loss.

(It is probably for the better that Sherlock isn't present: he wouldn't be able to disguise his disdain, his fury, and she isn't entirely certain he'd not have given an _ex tempore_ eulogy that dragged them all deeper. She realises, distantly, that the second-hand experience of British public schools has changed and warped and moulded her.)

She walks along the south bank of the Thames, past art and music and modern sculpture and trains, and in the ghosts of light reflected in the oilslick river and the clouds she remembers other mornings and other rivers and phonecalls. She feels herself disjointed, dislocated. She passes Diogenes, empty and dark; she arrives, finally, at 221b, where she unlocks the door and climbs the stairs and finds herself, eventually, with her head resting on the window and a sleeping London spread before her.

(The house was silent when she woke up two mornings after he left. She walked the floors methodically, through rooms that held surprises however intimately familiar she thought them, and found herself on the rooftop staring across streets. She returned to the kitchen; she made coffee; she ate granola. She found herself again, a little later, in her charity; and a while after that, in Sherlock's usual meeting. She turns her phone back on as she leaves, to find voicemail from Marcus, and it is there in the hallway that all of a sudden she understands. She almost hopes he'll saunter down the aisle of the plane and fold himself ungracefully into the seat next to her, and it isn't until she's landside at Heathrow that she _believes_.)

Her new apartment is quiet and tidy. She wakes up by herself, every morning, and she chooses her clothes, and she struggles to remember not to change Clyde's water as she makes her coffee. Ms Hudson visits the brownstone more regularly now, to look after the animals. She assumes that Ms Hudson's pay continues to arrive, just as her salary collects in an account she doesn't touch. She knows the locks haven't been replaced. Captain Gregson and Marcus look at her with concern, but they do not - to her faint surprise - press her.

( _I will fix this_ , he thinks, _for you_ , and pretends to himself that he's not sure who he's addressing, and ignores that he's adrift.)

_You always know it, Watson. If you didn't, it wouldn't be penance._


End file.
